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Android tablet prototypes not yet ready for prime time

Ars got a chance to play with three of NVIDIA's Tegra 2-based Android tablet …

The hype surrounding the iPad may have died down a bit, but if comments on Ars and the tech press coverage of Google I/O are anything to go by, the hype surrounding Android-based iPad competitors is just getting started. NVIDIA's Tegra 2 in particular is heavily anticipated as a chip that can elevate the nascent tablet gaming scene to new heights, and videos of a Tegra 2-based prototype tablet have been making the rounds online.

When I heard that Tegra 2 tablets would be at the Netbook Summit earlier this week, I made plans to drive down to Burlingame specifically to check them out. I wanted to see Tegra 2, with its dual-core Cortex A9 and NVIDIA-made GPU, in action. I've been a big booster of the idea that an Android- or webOS-based tablet could be superior to the iPad in a number of key respects, so I was prepared to be wowed by the demo units. And I was kind of wowed... but not in a good way.

As one of the major sponsors of the summit, NVIDIA had a strong presence. Their booth at the exhibit hall featured three different Tegra 2 tablet prototypes, all running Android. As I poked around at the different apps available for demo purposes—a Web browser, the Cooliris-based Gallery application, an AIR-based prototype of the newly launched Wired tablet app, and a short game that involved guiding a football player down the field—confusion began to set in. The performance stank. It was a stutter-fest. Worse-than-Nexus One performance was not what I was expecting from these prototypes.

Resizing pages with the Web browser was jerky and uneven. The Gallery app stuttered a bit and generally wasn't nearly as responsive as it is on my Nexus One phone. And the Wired tablet app was just awful, running as it did on Adobe's AIR platform. If you compare the demo app to the Wired iPad app released Wednesday, the difference is night and day in terms of performance. All three tablet prototypes were a huge let-down.

Interestingly enough, the 3D football game ran quite smoothly, and this is despite the noticeable stutter in the Android interface, Gallery app, and Web browser. In fact, that football game was about the only thing that ran smoothly. Unfortunately, it wasn't that spectacular of a demo piece, because the players didn't appear to have many polygons—in all, the graphics weren't much better than Dungeon Hunter on the iPad, at least not that I could tell.

I chatted with the NVIDIA rep on-site about the problems, and his initial response was to tell me how many times more powerful a 1GHz Tegra 2 is than the iPad's A4. I told him I was well aware of the differences between the two chips, and I even began to rattle off microarchitectural details of both designs so that he'd know that I wasn't some random journalist. He then told me that the tablets were running a beta version of Android 2.1 (Eclair), and that most of the apps I was looking at were betas.

In all, it's a genuine mystery as to why these tablets were in such rough shape. It could be some combination of beta software and beta GPU drivers—but really, I have no idea. It seems to defy the laws of physics that a Tegra 2-based Android tablet would have a less responsive UI than the Snapdragon-based Nexus One, but that was my experience yesterday. And forget about comparisons to the iPad. The iPad's performance so far exceeded the three prototypes that the only way I can think of that these prototypes were put into the hands of the public is that nobody at NVIDIA actually owns an iPad. If I weren't a regular iPad user and didn't know what a responsive touch UI was like, I could see where I might think that the prototypes' performance was acceptable for a set of early demo models.

One other issue with the Android tablets concerns the general scalability of the user interface. I mentioned this in a previous post, and my experience with an Android tablet only confirmed what I wrote earlier. So many of the Android UI elements just don't look so great when they're stretched all the way across a wide tablet screen. This is because most of the UI elements that work on smartphone screens don't make the jump to the tablet very elegantly. Issues like this are why the iPad runs a tablet-specific version of Apple's phone OS; perhaps Google could take a page from Apple's playbook and release Android: Tablet Edition. App developers are going to want to make "HD" or "XL" versions of their Android apps, and they won't be able to do the tablet form factor justice without a new set of widgets.

The future is still bright for Google/ARM tablets

I don't think that my experience yesterday really reflects what Tegra 2-based tablets will look like when they start coming to market in the latter part of the year. Some combination of Android 2.2 (Froyo) and driver optimization will fix all of these issues. I recount the experience, though, to make the point that the Android tablets aren't yet fully baked, which is almost certainly why you can't run out and buy one right now at Best Buy. Both Google and the OEMs still have to get these ready for prime time.

In the long run, Chrome OS is a much more likely candidate for an official Google-branded tablet than is Android. Web-based interfaces are made with larger screen sizes in mind. More importantly, though, Chrome OS isn't a smartphone OS—it's designed for thin-client desktops, and it doesn't have to make tradeoffs to fit into smartphone hardware.

All Chrome OS plans aside, Android is what's freely available now for tablet makers to use, so that's what will be shipping on many upcoming tablets. With some performance optimizations the OS will be serviceable for tablets, and an expanded palette of more tablet-friendly interface elements would go a long way toward making it a true iPad competitor.

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